Your last post looks realy cool after 1hr. My internal version uses nearly the double of the time as the standalone, Don´t know why...
I believe to remember that there used to be (or still is) an issue where it was taking considerable amounts of CPU time to copy the updated internal image from the renderer to the Softimage render window. Afaik this only affected render windows but not the Render region (or vice versa?) Maybe this is slowing your "internal" version of the render down? Have you tried updating the Render Window less frequently and see if that speeds up the total render time? I think I also remember that copying one large chunk of data to the window is slower than copying many small chunks. Stefan
